From the point of any ( wholly false) identification with anything, having a few (?) ounces of brain out could be, though can't see any reason why it would HAVE to be? a somewhat fearful idea. You know, brain damage, death, who knows. But that would SO CLEARLY be based on only false identification. Look inside and we all KNOW that.

(Thanks for your thoughts for me today. But - most fortunately - I'm under no obligation to take on anyone's image of me so won't!)

But it seems that that knowing, if still slightly lost in the dualistic clouds of knowing, needs, can't think of a better word than ' finessing', so 'it' is completely, absolutely, beyond any knowledge and/or non-knowledge or anything else.And not beyond anything too. And nothing needs finessing either. Words are useless aren't they? On every level but their irrelevance.

So, as Robert Adams said many a time, let's have some music.

'Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could
Somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.'

Feel the crap, the schmaltz, the transcendence. Man, what were Rogers & Hammerstein ON?"

I met up with Andy yesterday. He's just come back from a holiday at his brother's house in the French countryside. From radiotherapy & chemo he's lost 15% of his body weight & half his hair. He's been given about another 6 months to live. But he's genuinely as cool as a cucumber. Much to the confusion of his family & medical staff. Talk about where the rubber meets the road. It's an honour to know him.

I met up with Andy yesterday. He's just come back from a holiday at his brother's house in the French countryside. From radiotherapy & chemo he's lost 15% of his body weight & half his hair. He's been given about another 6 months to live. But he's genuinely as cool as a cucumber. Much to the confusion of his family & medical staff. Talk about where the rubber meets the road. It's an honour to know him.

Worrying about death is like worrying about what will happen to us if we fall off the edge of the flat earth. The problem is imaginary. What dies? What is born?

We might say, my baby Bobby is born. But what is Bobby? This baby we call Bobby emerged out of other life forms and is utterly dependent on air, food, water and relationships with other beings in order to survive and prosper. The ever-changing appearance we call Bobby is never found outside of consciousness, and my Bobby is not exactly the same as your Bobby. In fact, my Bobby isn't the same from one moment to the next. Sometimes he is funny, sometimes he is irritating, sometimes he is open-hearted, sometimes he is self-righteous.

On every level from the subatomic to the organic to the neurochemical to the emotional to the cognitive, “Bobby” is nothing but constant flux and impermanence. In fact, “Bobby” is a conceptual abstraction – functionally useful and relatively real – but ultimately, as unrelated to the ever-changing actuality of Bobby as a map is to the territory it describes. “Bobby” is an abstract idea that gives the illusion of continuity to the embryo, the baby, the toddler, the teenager, the adult, the old man, and the dead body. But if we look closely, with either scientific or meditative inquiry, we can't actually find any-thing that continues from one moment to the next.

Maybe Bobby decides to change gender at some point and turns into Roberta. Or maybe he goes to war and comes back without his limbs, or with his face burned off, or with a traumatic brain injury that completely alters his verbal, emotional and cognitive faculties. Maybe at age 25, Bobby was a wild radical, and at age 65, he is a rigid conservative (or visa versa). Where in all this ever-changing movement is “Bobby”?

Finally, we say Bobby has died. But what exactly has died? We cannot deny the reality of something we called Bobby that is no longer with us, but we can't actually find or pin down precisely what that was either. Perhaps birth and death is every moment, and perhaps there is no solid thing that begins or ends.

We fear death because the single thing we cherish most is our beingness – the undeniable sense of aware presence that we learn to mistakenly conflate with the conceptual abstraction we think of as the bodymind. We think that "I" (awareness) am encapsulated inside "the body." But actually, awareness is boundless and the bodymind appears in it, not the other way around. And this bodymind doesn't exist as the separate, continuous, independent “thing” we think it is.

And even the sense of aware presence disappears every night in deep sleep and no one is left to miss it. Every night, our unique Movie of Waking Life ends completely – and the phantom watcher ends too. No one is left to miss the show. We find this refreshing and rejuvenating, not terrifying. But when we think about death, we imagine ourselves buried alive, unable to turn the TV back on and find out what happens next in The Story of Me. This fear is like the fear of stepping off the edge of the flat earth.

For there is something (that is not some-thing at all) that is more subtle than even that first sense of conscious awareness, something that remains when all appearances end. It has been given many names: Primordial Awareness, the Ultimate Subject, the Self, True Self, God, emptiness, no-thing-ness, Unicity, Zero. But the actuality of it is prior to any name we put on it. It is more subtle than anything perceivable, conceivable or experienceable, subtler even than space. It is the ever-present Heart of our being, so if we are looking for it, we are actually looking out of it. Intuitively, we know that what we ultimately are, beyond name and form and even before consciousness, is indestructible. This Ultimate Reality was never born and it can never die. All our stories of heaven and hell and reincarnation are primitive attempts to express this intuitive knowing. But it is not "me" who continues, for "me" has never actually existed in the first place.

When we look at nature, we see that everything is endlessly being recycled. A dead body nourishes the soil and becomes food for other life forms. There is no end and no beginning to this seamless, boundless unicity that is always Here / Now. Now is timeless presence, the only real eternity there is. Here is this immediacy that is the only real infinity. Here / Now is the groundless ground that Buddhists call emptiness and Advaitans call the Self.

We won't find the deathless by thinking about all this. It is not some concept that we finally understand. It is simply waking up from the illusion of separation and substantiality, relaxing into the simplicity of Here / Now, realizing that there is no one to fall and no ground to hit.

“Bobby” was a creation of smoke and mirrors rather like the illusion of continuity and narrative created by the pages of a flip book or the frames in a movie appearing in rapid succession. Bobby was an activity of the totality in the same way that a wave is an activity of the ocean. There is no real boundary between one wave and another, and no wave is any wetter or any closer to the water than any other wave.

Our true immortality is not in fighting off death and keeping the body alive forever, nor is it in some individual “soul” that leaves the body and either goes to heaven or reincarnates in a new body. Our true immortality is waking up to the vastness, the True Self that is without beginning or end. Just as the eye cannot see itself, and the hand cannot grasp itself, and the fire cannot burn itself, and the sword cannot cut itself, so you can never find this boundless unicity because you are not apart from it, and "it" is not a "thing" that can be grasped.

To realize this Ultimate Reality is to pass through the gateless gate of enlightenment. The gate is said to be gateless because when the illusion of separation is seen through, when the bubble of apparent encapsulation pops, you realize that You (the True Self) were never not here, and that the little "me" at the center of your life story was never anything but a dream-like imagination. And thus it is clear that there was never anyone who passed through any gate. Nothing was ever lacking. But at the same time, there is an undeniable and life-changing difference between knowingly realizing this and being confused and entranced by the story of separation and lack, which is why there is said to be a gate rather than no gate at all. As the great Advaita sage Nisargadatta put it, “Your begging bowl may be of pure gold, but as long as you do not know it, you are a pauper.”

Waking up is like dying. Dying to the past. Dying to the known. Dying to all your thoughts, ideas and beliefs. Dying to who and what you think you are. Dying to all hope and hopelessness. Dying to everything. Letting go of every attempt to hold on, to grasp, to control. Losing everything that can be lost and discovering what remains.
~Joan Tollifson